As a technology service provider (TSP), you may be restricting your organizations growth by limiting the billing options you give your customers.
With the advent of the cloud, a large percentage of deliveries are becoming subscription based and sometimes even usage based. In a recent survey I posted on Linkedin, an overwhelming majority validated this fact. Over 794 users viewed the survey and 17 responded, with 82% indicating that a large shift is underway. The survey is still in progress, as this article is being posted, but the results are clear.
This shift to subscription and usage based is difficult to implement primarily because its recurring. Usage values every period must be agreed to by the customer and the services provider, from usage sources that are accessible and verifiable.
Technology service providers are increasingly being asked by customers to switch their billing mechanisms. When your competitors start offering these services and their delivery mechanism are geared to execute, and you cannot you are at a disadvantage and lose customers. Shifting to these new forms not only requires internal policies and processes, but also requires automated systems to cover these capabilities. Manual or disjointed execution of these systems typically cause the following problems.
Revenue leakage from missed out or under billing
Delayed payments due to delay in billing – primarily because it is more difficult to obtain the periodic values, get it approved and send for billing
Customer dissatisfaction and potential disputes due to wrong billing
Internal reporting, analytics and metrics get difficult and difficult to obtain
Compliance norms (e.g., revenue recognition norms)
Higher administrative costs due to the manual nature of work and to sort out the above issues
Typically, if you are above 50 of invoices a month, automation of revenue management and billing operations start becoming necessary. To add to the above, your new types of billing need to co-exist with existing forms of delivery and billing making it even more complex. It is possible that one could have usage based, subscription based, project milestone based, timesheet based and regular billing all at the same time.
That’s where hybrid billing systems come in. When you initiate automation or a replacement of your existing system you need one that can handle any type of billing. You need the ability to switch between types of billing across customers, individual contracts and sometimes even within line items of a contract.
Moving to hybrid is no longer a nice to have, but critical to your technology service business. Very few products handle hybrid billing and if they do, they are expensive. Stragiliti Revenue Management and Billing is a ground up hybrid revenue management and billing system covering all the variations of billing. In additional it has a lot of features relevant for the revenue management cycle from contracts to invoices/ payments. For more details visit